I spent yesterday snorkeling off Waimanalo across from Rabbit Island and the fictional Robin Masters estate from Magnum PI. Superb coral garden to the west, few fish though. I especially liked the strange islands of coral that rose up circular like barrels in blue and green and yellow and white. The Big Island still has the best snorkeling.
Kathie and I went to a beer tasting party in Kailua. Mostly military types. Kailua is that kind of town. People probably didn’t have a whole lot in common with us, I can’t remember their names but Kathie and I got to talk and hang out without her husband David or my friend Marilyn around. Marilyn went for a drive and had dinner again at Koko Head. She wouldn’t have had a good time at this party, guaranteed. Kathie and I sucked back a few beers and ate great pupus, even pipipupus which is beef. To peepee is to go shishi. Tres chic. So you have to be careful.
We took off our swim pareaus, Hawaiian pronounce every letter, soaked in the jacuzzi. Most everybody was from the mainland at one time or another. There were a few Hawaiian boys in this haole madness. The hostess Joanne is small and dark. Joanne’s husband Buzz is in the National Guard, he’s a beefy blond tough guy with speech patterns to match. He seems sweet. A dollar on the billiard table builds the excitement inside.
Kathie and I sit under the eaves, fresh rain has fallen and cleared the afternoon mugginess from the sky. Someone asks for a Moosehead. Buzz looks in the fridge saying, no moose heads in here, but plenty of beer.
Kathie explains Greek and Sicilian to someone and everybody think she is from the islands. I am tan enough that people aren’t sure if I live here or not. I went to the party in in order to see urban Hawaiian life. Most of the women were racially mixed, while we were white. Military is one of the biggest employers here. And it is colorblind. Kathy says local businesses were hurting when the military was involved in the war—especially the bars.
David works for the military, as do most of the people in this room. Not necessarily enlisted, but as civilians. David does carpentry maintenance and said he had to sign an agreement of non-disclosure—any information he saw or learned on the bases stayed on the base. Clearance codes are like badges, he says, he doesn’t want to know what’s going on. Whenever something comes out into the paper, then he can discuss what is already public knowledge.
He had to sign an agreement that he wouldn’t disclose anything he learned for the next 50 years. The military is worried that the Russians might get those secrets. Ironic in that I just returned from Russia and I say to him, I’m probably on some list, you know. David says during the Iraq war, dolphins were used to retrieve torpedoes. He said contrary to what people think, the Navy isn’t into killer dolphins. They’re too valuable an animal to use on a kamikaze style mission.
Glancing over the library shelves is always a good indicator of character. Both David and Kathie are avid readers. I find William Least Heat Moon. and Blue Highways is next to Larry McMurtry and the Adventures of Marco Polo. I’m too lazy to bend down and see the author. I figure the book is a classic, it’s been around for ages. Several of Isabel Allende’s books, Tolkien is de rígeur. And the Stephen J Gould trilogy. Coffee table books on The Beatles, Baez, the movie industry, Hawaiiana, London, and a fair amount of pulp fiction along with collector’s editions of Shakespeare, Little Men, and Call of the Wild, etc.
I can’t write a portrait of a woman in a white room, my current passion, because this room is of paneled wood stained gray. I wonder if she’s happy here, or merely surviving life’s trials. They’ve both gotten plump from too much beer. No kids ever came along. She has a friend who started a Romanian child adoption agency. I wonder if she will pursue that avenue. I try to bring the subject up referring to myself saying that I have given up on having kids at this point because at 38 years old, I still haven’t found Mr. Right. but she doesn’t bite. The cats have become their children.
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